The Last Days of Video (12 page)

“
Whah-whah-whah,
” Constance was saying. “
Whah-whah watched that Tabitha Gray movie on Netflix last night, whah-whah where she's a grave robber—
”

“Wait, what did you say?” Alaura asked.

Alaura focused on Constance, who was tall and plain and always smiling, with limp blonde hair, broad shoulders, and a long, Sarah Jessica Parker face.

“The one where Tabitha Gray's, like, a gun-toting grave robber who knows karate,” Constance said. “Her, you know,
breasts
are bigger than her head. And she's, like, stick-figure skinny. How could she even lift a rifle—”

“No,” Alaura interrupted. “You said you watched the movie
on
Netflix?”

“Oh.” Constance winked. “My husband, he's kind of a nerdy techie guy. He uses these hummadinger cords attached to our computer. I'm not sure what they're called. But you plug them in, and you can watch movies on Netflix.”

“You mean, like, on your computer?”

“No! On our TV! It's really neat. Netflix just started doing it. You press a few buttons, and zoosh, there's a movie playing on your TV.”

“Any movie?”

“No,” Constance said. “They don't have a very good selection, but
whah-whah-whah, whah-whah
. . .”

Alaura tuned her out again. All at once, the implications crashed down on her. It didn't matter if Netflix only offered one crappy Tabitha Gray movie online. Soon it would be ten other movies. Then a thousand. Then ten thousand.

Every movie ever, zooshed directly to your television.

Of course she'd heard about this. She'd known it was coming in exactly the way Constance had just described. But now it was here, like a wrecking ball on its downward descent to demolish Star Video.

Alaura looked again at Constance. Her friend was now telling some senseless story, laughing about her husband/children/recent technological acquisitions, and she seemed completely unaware of Alaura's distress. Alaura sighed. She had always attended to Constance's complaints—about money, career, children, boyfriends, marriage, love affairs, everything—so she had not felt selfish initiating this bitch session. Not one bit. Now, for once, she needed Constance's help.

But brunch was not going according to plan. Thus far, Constance had seemed more interested in pointing out Alaura's life errors, past and present, than in providing the compassionate understanding Alaura had always given her. Constance demanded that Alaura quit Star Video at once. She suggested job-search websites and wardrobe intervention. She stated again and again that she had “never liked
that Pierce,” and she babbled that this confluence of events was “an excellent opportunity for cleansing,” a vaguely nauseating notion that Alaura, despite her background of religious wandering and herbal experimentation, did not understand in the slightest.

Slowly Alaura was realizing that this “friend” hardly knew her anymore. How had that happened? True, Alaura hadn't seen Constance at all over the summer because of how much time she'd spent with Pierce. But still . . . somehow Constance had become a minor character in the drama of Alaura's life, unworthy even of backstory, multiple scenes, hard focus.

“Where
is
Karla?” Alaura repeated, this time to herself, and she gulped a mouthful of mimosa, then signaled their waiter for a refill.

Karla: her best friend. Karla had been out of the picture since beginning that weird life-training stuff over two months ago. But if anyone could straighten out this mess—straighten out Alaura's life—it was Karla.

Ten minutes later, Karla
floated into the diner.

As always, Karla was devastatingly beautiful, luminescent, the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, her arms and hips barely on the healthy side of anorexia, her face narrow and firm like a graphite-framed structure designed to support her significant lips. She was the only redhead Alaura had ever known who did not look like an anemic alien—Karla, Princess of Pallid.

The tablecloth rose and settled when Karla took her seat, as if by ghostly breeze.

Men at nearby tables looked beyond their wives at the new glowing creature.

“I have to tell you the most amazing thing,” Karla said, staring deeply into Alaura's eyes.

Karla's voice broke the spell of her own entrance, and only at that moment did Alaura perceive that there was something very
different about her friend. Karla sat more upright than normal. Almost rigid. She wore a broad smile rather than her usual sexy glower, for at heart she was a temperamental metal sculptor, given to rumination and self-criticism. And she gazed with otherworldly intensity into Alaura's eyes, which was not necessarily out of character, though the creepy duration of the eye contact certainly was.

“Are you okay?” Alaura said worriedly, finding it impossible to disconnect from Karla's glistening green orbs.

“Oh, my dear,
dear
friend. You're the first person I thought of.”

Karla hugged Alaura.

Alaura felt the embrace shaking—her friend was weeping.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“Oh, Alaura,” Karla said, leaning back and reestablishing eye contact. “I've had the most wonderful, wonderful experience. Something has happened to me that has changed my life forever.”

“Are you crying?”

“These are tears of joy!”

A man rushed toward their table waving a handkerchief like a surrender flag—Alaura shooed him away.

“I've just finished the Advanced Experience at the Reality Center,” Karla explained. “The most amazing month of my life!”

“You mean that life-training stuff?”

“No, Alaura. It's not training. It's experiential learning. They show you, Alaura, they really show you. How to achieve transformation. How to live with intention.
Real
intention. And once you have real intention, you know how to
be.
That's what I'm talking about, Alaura. Being.”

Alaura realized she was nervously chewing her pinky nail. She forced her hand toward the table.

“You have to come, Alaura. If you never do anything else that I ask, please come with me to the Reality Center. It's exactly what you need, Alaura.”

“What makes you think I need—”

“Because I heard the sadness and pain and loneliness in all those voicemails you've been leaving me. And I know what your problem is.”

“My problem?”

“You hide in movies, Alaura. You escape into fantasy. You're a victim of the fracturing of our modern world. We're all cut off from one another. And movies are how you cut off yourself. You live through a television screen. Through other people's stories. Alaura, the Reality Center has taught me that you must run
toward
your intention, not away from it, because the future is today.”

Alaura's face warmed in embarrassment—both for Karla, who sounded pretty much like a crazy person, but also for herself, because something about what Karla was saying was not entirely bonkers. Alaura
had
been watching too much television, almost twelve hours per day, too many movies, polishing off the last of Almodóvar's and Cronenberg's crazy films like she'd planned to do for years, and binging on shows, finishing one DVD then starting the next almost immediately.

And, as Alaura thought about it, all the wine and weed and cigarettes probably qualified as “escaping reality” as well.

“Please come with me to the Reality Center,” Karla pleaded, smiling her intensely beautiful smile. “I know that you're
meant
to do this, Alaura. There's a glorious being of light within you, just begging to emerge.”

“A being of light?”

“A majestic being of light,” Karla said. “Our society is at a turning point, Alaura. Those who are willing to embrace the truth, and embrace one another, will lead us toward the future!”

Alaura looked across the table at Constance. For once, Constance wasn't smiling. Her lips were sewn shut. Her neck was tight as a rope. It was sweet, Alaura thought, how Constance was so obviously put off by Karla's weird earnestness. And Alaura realized that, despite today's awkwardness, Constance
had
been a good friend
to her. Always a lot of fun, always honest (in her own way). One botched summer hadn't erased all of that.

Still, Alaura could see clearly how Constance rarely allowed her to talk about herself. Constance never asked questions. It was always Alaura's job to listen—somehow Alaura had fallen into the role of caregiver with Constance as well.

Karla was different. She radiated compassion. She was complicated but caring. She looked at life through a spiritual-artistic lens. She spent her days creating art and meditating and reading bizarre texts—the letters of Gauguin, the journals of Anaïs Nin, the Bible. And years ago, Karla had been the only one to listen—really listen—when Alaura had gone through her period of religious wandering, from Christianity to Wicca to Buddhism to Confucianism to all the others, and the corresponding history of tattoos—Santeria crucifix on her back, the Buddha and Chinese characters on her neck, Mother Goddess in the form of cephalopod on her right arm (which in truth had been inspired by an insane acid trip and a viewing of
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea).
Karla, trim and delicate as she seemed, was in fact tough and perceptive and wise. A spiritual seeker, just like Alaura.

She's an honest-to-God metal sculptor! Alaura thought.

A waitress with Zooey Deschanel bangs and black fingernails arrived with breakfast. Alaura had ordered a deep-fried sausage sandwich—she was shocked now that she had allowed herself such a greasy indulgence. She looked at the sagging thing on the plate in front of her. Everything about it disgusted her. The glistening exoskeleton. The twists of blue steam. Even the fanned slices of orange—fruit suggesting what? That this meal was somehow defensible?

The sandwich was like her life—disgusting and indefensible.

She turned to Karla.

“When?” Alaura said.

“Today,” Karla responded excitedly. “There's a guest event at five p.m.”

“Okay, I'll think about it.”

A sibilant gasp across the table; Constance touched her mouth in horror.

Karla looked toward the ceiling. She beamed. Bright white energy spilled from her pores, filling the restaurant like a Klieg light.

“Oh, Alaura,” she said glowingly. “Make sure to dress up. Something businessy. And come sober. And keep a positive attitude. Reality might seem freaky at first, but if you keep positive, it will change your life forever.”

After breakfast, walking toward
Star Video, her head spinning from Karla's bizarre proclamations and also still from the ramifications of being able to watch movies
on
Netflix, Alaura came across a crowd of twenty people gathered on the front lawn of Weaver Street Market, West Appleton's organic co-op grocery store. Standing on a small stage at the center of the group, under the shade of a sprawling oak, a young woman was reading a truly god-awful poem.

Such a display was not uncommon in West Appleton, especially now that the midday heat had finally dropped below eighty-five degrees. Alaura had noticed street musicians popping up everywhere, more people out walking and running and biking in the evenings, and there were more hula-hoopers and interpretive dancers/schizophrenics frolicking around. But what caught Alaura's attention this morning was not the crowd of people, nor the terrible poem (which was one of the most excruciating things she'd heard in a long, long time—all “raven of the night” and “blood splashed upon the moon”), nor that the poor girl reading it was visibly shaking in intense self-awareness of her own poem's awfulness. What caught Alaura's attention were all the tiny video cameras.

Four of them, to be exact. Little handheld things, no bigger than a cell phone. More than Alaura had ever seen in one place. They were called Flip Video cameras, and Alaura knew that they could be
plugged directly into a computer. You could download your video and zoosh, post it online. Or you could cut together your own little movies, using free editing software. The cameras had been on sale since last year.

And now here they were, on the Weaver Street Market lawn, their small, rectangular screens shining like badges of light, all of them held aloft by skinny undergrads.

Not to mention that half the damn people on the lawn were chatting on their six-hundred-dollar iPhones.

Alaura realized that the tiny cameras were focused on the petrified bard, and that they were all capturing her crime on digital video. Digital video that would soon be uploaded, most likely, to YouTube.

The future is today
, Alaura thought, and at that moment, she decided she had no choice but to go to the visitor's event at the Reality Center.

“Don't do it,” Waring
said, perched on his director's chair behind Star Video's counter. “Sounds like a scam.”

Dorian—Alaura's favorite part-timer and Star Video's musical and concert film expert—was working, too. Upon his ageless face hung a calm, though concerned, frown.